Palin has been one of the hot young prospects in GOP circles for a long time. This is a great pic. Even if McCain loses, she’ll get important natl exposure. She’ll kill in the heartland/soccer mom group.
Also sets her up to take back Stevens lost senate seat in 6 years.
How many igloos does she own?
She’s the same age as Obama was when he spoke at the DNC convention in 2004 and started to get Presidential buzz.
She’s been Governor for 2 years and 5(?) years as a mayor, so she has some Executive experience. Something neither McCain, Obama or Biden has.
I’m trying to picture her taking on Biden in a debate.
Yeah, I think this is a pretty iffy pick. On the one hand, she’s a woman! On the other, that is very obviously the only reason that McCain picked her. I think people may be more turned off by the open pandering than McCain thinks.
Maybe McCain just likes the idea of having a good looking babe on each side of him on the podium,
All McCain really needs is to pick up maybe 10% of the PUMA (party unity my ass) pissed off Hillary voters to win.
Wait, didn’t somebody else have only 2 years experience when he first started running for President?
How old was that guy?
She knows how to check email: smart pick.
Also: she might have some mileage, but she still smokes the tires.
Well, she’s at least a lot easier on the eyes than Dick Cheney.
Maybe that’s the strategy? “That old man is being meeeaaan to me?” I dunno, but this makes it pretty clear that the only strategy they have left is trying to pull the PUMAs. I just seriously doubt that there are enough of them to have an impact.
Palin’s plusses:
Downside:
I think this goes over great guns in the R base and is aimed squarely at the soccer mom demographic who McCain has to win.
I actually wanted Meg W. but Palin is a very good choice.
This is an extremely weak pick, but McCain didn’t have much choice. Since his current standing is based on a mix of wrong assumptions by his supporters (his conservative supporters are assuming he will be more loyal to the party line than he he historically has been, and his moderate supporters are assuming he’s more of a maverick than he really is) all of his “conventional” choices would have cost him some support IMO. So for the last few weeks I’ve been figuring he would be somebody youngish and out of left field (I was thinking Jindal). Palin IMO is in the same mold as Jindal.
But even though McCain probably had to make a weak pick, I can’t see Palin helping him much. Yeah she’s a woman, but as has has already been pointed out, her positions on the issues probably won’t help her much with that demographic. Also, the appearance of this being a “symbolic” or “affirmative action” type pick is pretty damn strong. Also, she really has very little experience, less than Obama. As to the “celebrity” attack on Obama, her primary claim to fame prior to politics was being a beauty queen. On top of all that, she’s mixed up in a lot of the Alaska GOP sleaze thats brewing up there.
Obama picked substance over style when he picked Biden. He picked a serious heavyweight with strong experience. McCain picked a relatively unknown lightweight with a lot of baggage, who looks young and pretty and might be charismatic. It’s a weak pick, and I think between the strong Dem convention, Obama’s powerful speech, the weakness of this pick, and what i expect to be a fairly low-power GOP convention, we are seeing the turning point of the campaign.
McCain was almost certainly going for surprise or shock value and I think he’s going to be surprised when the voter response is “who? what?”.
her wikipedia page has some good things to say about her (i haven’t checked for accuracy though): she was a whistle blower on republican corruption, killed the bridge to nowhere.
plus that trooper she tried to have fired:
In 2006, before Palin was governor, Wooten was briefly suspended for ten days for threatening to kill McCann’s (and Palin’s) father, tasering his 11-year-old stepson, and violating game laws. After a union protest, the suspension was reduced to five days.[47]
the newpaper article said that the stepson asked have it done to him.
all unconfirmed from wikipedia though.
I wonder if the McCain campaign will stop running those ads questioning why Hillary wasn’t Obama’s VP pick now. She was second place, so she should be the VP, right?
Well, I do think McCain needs to make a bold pick to counter momentum, and the good thing about Palin is that she’ll be hard to attack, and her youth may counter some of the concerns about his age. My guess is that Obama will still mostly go after McCain, because aside from a general abuse of power-based storyline, she doesn’t have a lot of downside. Also - it will be harder to cast his VP as the next Dick Cheney if she’s warm, energetic, young and female.
My wife has been fairly pro-Obama for a while. I suspect this pick may put my wife back on the fence, at least a bit. My quick read on her is that she is someone my wife and a lot like her can identify with. The fact that she’s, AFAIK, not the heir to a political dynasty is a plus. That she’s attractive is a plus - I think people sometimes don’t realize how often judgement calls are made on looks - Obama’s looks have helped him, I think.
Not that these issues (gender, appearance, etc.) are the best way to choose our nation’s leaders, but being realistic, they do matter.
The biggest downside for McCain is, as others have mentioned, she doesn’t have too much experience, and that’ll weaken McCain’s ability to effectively go after Obama on the experience issue.
You missed one.
Being mayor of a town of 7,000 is the kind of executive experience McCain has been calling for!
No. He had two years experience in the US Senate, and eight years in the Illinois senate prior to that. And that’s assuming that we let you get away with the trick of comparing Palin’s record today with Obama’s of two years ago, which is obviously silly. We’ve spent the last four years watching Obama, and a good number of people have clearly decided that he has what it takes to be president in spite of his relatively light resume.
But who the hell is Sarah Palin? I’ll wager that 99% of the country had never even heard of her before this morning.